Fedora 11 comes with many improvements in package management including a update version of RPM and Yum that reduces memory consumption and performs faster. Fedora 11 also includes the presto plugin for Yum that downloads the binary deltas for updates and typically saves over 80% of the download size. Linux Mag takes a look with some interesting benchmarks that show modest improvements overall.

Do the binary delta updates work from any package version? For example, if I had package-1.0 from the install DVD, then did a normail yum update to package-1.1 will the deltas work when going from 1.1 to 1.2? Or do they only work from the base install versions?

Since I'm not fond RPM based distros, I was a little disappointed when I tried out the Fedora 11 Xfce spin and its GUI package manager (PackageKit?) would time out and lock up without any indication of what was going on. Reminded me a bit of Yast and why I left openSUSE. Anyway, at the request of some helpful people at the forums, I removed the default GUI package manager and installed yumex, and what do you know, it makes a world of difference. Now I'm learning to work from the command line with yum, which isn't much different from apt, pacman, or pkg_install. Binary diffs are a godsend. Like I said, I've never much cared for RPM based distros, not since the Redhat 5.2 days, but Fedora 11 is starting to grow on me.